Trig Longo shot up in his bed, panting heavily as the memory of countless loud, rhythmic screams reverberated in his head from the nightmare...no. Not a nightmare. A memory.
A memory of the worst days of his life, the passage of time from start to finish was undocumented, and he had no idea how long it had been between the time the situation first started when the Purge docked with the Vector, and the time he had escaped with three other survivors on the Freebird. All he knew was that during those few, dark days, he had lost the only family he had ever known to a soulless, unstoppable, and insatiably hungry monster, one that had brought the might of an Imperial Star Destroyed to it's knees and ripped it apart, limb for limb, one crew member at a time.
The memories of the fleshy creature with the accordion nose, the smell of death lingering in his own nasal cavity as hands closed around his neck, blaster fire, the taste and smell of ozone, surrounding him, crushing him in it's doom-sayer's song. The maggot-white plastic bucket falling off. Pushing his own brother...no...what had become of his brother...out of the vent shaft and down through the abyss to slam into one of the great turbines as a sea of faces looked up at him in a horrifying unity.
All of it had come back to him in a rush of memory.
He lived on Chandrila now, with the only female who had experienced the same pain as him. The only other survivor of the entire ordeal on-board the Purge. Doctor Zahara Cody. The other two survivors...a pair of smugglers, one a furry beast known only as a wookiee, and the other, a happy-go-lucky, witty, and impulsive human smuggler, had been in solitary for the first half of the horrifying experience. And they had gone their separate ways as soon as the Freebird had been sold, the last physical reminder of those wet gasps for breath as life faded away, the complete silence that decorated the halls of the massive ships, interrupted at the worst times only by the rhythmic screams of those less fortunate.
He looked down at his own shaking hands, panting heavily. He was fifteen, and he had already witnessed a horror that thousands of men twice...even thrice...his age hadn't survived.
The horror of it all would haunt him for the rest of his life. The only person he could tell...the only person who knew his pain...was a woman ten years his senior, a medical doctor. One who had probably seen even more horror than him, after all, she had seen the effects of the infection first hand, it had been her job to stop the nightmare before it started, and she had failed. There was nothing she could do, honestly, except watch the sickness run it's course, her patients dropping like flies, and then reviving and disappearing all at once.
He could still feel their hungry eyes on him. Those dead, rotting eyes. Staring soullessly into him, the only thing they wanted was to devour him, tear him apart and eat him. They wanted food.
The Empire had never before thought of something so insidious. Not even the Death Star was as horrifying as Blackwing. At least, with the Death Star. Your death was quick, and that was the end. You knew it was coming, but you wouldn't really feel any pain. Your body would be obliterated in a matter of moments. Not reanimated to be used as a weapon by the very Empire you swore to destroy.
That was the thing, while they had been in lockup on the Purge, supposedly for having Rebel sympathies, Trig, his brother Kale, and to his knowledge, his father Von, had none. At that point in time.
Now? Only Trig remained. And he hated the Empire with everything he had.
Fists clenched, the cold sweat of a reliving horror flowing over the shaking hands that it coated.
The Empire. The Empire that would unleash this upon the Galaxy. To what purpose, Trig would never discover. The disease was uncontrollable, if the empire had perfected it to the level that the research had hoped for, the disease would stop at nothing, simply spreading across the galaxy, infecting or devouring everything it encountered.
What was the point? Trig would never know. Because Blackwing had been defeated.
And Trig had survived to live another day.
And that, in the end, was all that mattered.